Geo-Targeting’s Impact on Web Sites, Email

Much like the age old real estate axiom, location is of utmost importance when it comes to direct digital marketing. This is true in a number of ways, and Knotice has been working very hard to leverage that reality to improve the performance of various direct digital marketing campaigns - whether campaigns are executed in the email, Web site, or mobile channel.

The location of your Web visitors is important. You may want to display different content for people in different geographic locations. For example, if you’re holding an event at a certain location, you may want to show people within 50 miles a coupon for admission. People outside that 50 mile radius probably aren’t going to make the drive, so perhaps you would prefer to offer them a coupon for an online purchase. Or maybe you have new products debuting on the West coast, but they won’t arrive on the East coast for a number of weeks. You would likely want to promote those products to Californians, but hold off on promoting them in New York until the supply was ready to meet the demand.

Here is where geo-targeting becomes essential for direct digital marketing. Good direct digital marketing software offers its users the ability to control specific content displayed on a Web site and in email programs based on the location of the Web visitor. If that visitor is someone already in your database, the software will use their visitor’s known location to deliver the content aimed at their location, right down to the zip code level.

But what about anonymous visits, the people browsing the Web whose identity is unknown to you? No problem. Use the IP address of these unknown Web visitors and determine their location with a high degree of accuracy, down to the city level. So even if someone has never interacted with your Web site before, they will still see the content you’ve designed specifically for their geographic location.

Speaking of content, we all know how important it is to make sure your Web content looks and feels perfect. So there is only a limited benefit to previewing your dynamic content within your site without being able to see how it looks with all the other elements of your Web page. That’s why in-context previews are so important. The in-context preview allows you to see how your dynamic and geo-targeted Web site content looks on your pages without having to push it live. This saves time, effort, and offers marketers a more specific view of the content they are constructing.

Whether you’re talking about your customers or your content, it’s all about location. Geo-targeting and in-context previewing are two ways that good direct digital marketing software can help its users be in a very desirable location – ahead of the curve.